Ukraine, a new book by Giulio Sapelli on the country attacked by Russia: here are the first pages

Ma What country is Ukraine really?, today shocked by Russian aggression, and what does its history teach? It starts from here the new book by Giulio Sapelli, economic historian and counter-current intellectual, “Ukraine year zero. A war between worlds”, published by Guerini and goWare, with a preface by the Director of Limes, Lucio Caracciolo.

Courtesy of the author and publishers, we publish the premise of Sapelli's book.

Nicolás González Varela, director of the legendary porteña bookshop «Gandhi», a pupil of José (Pacho) Arycò and a scholar of Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger, wrote this in his essay «Marx y Ukraine: contra la Realpolitik infantil» (in Viento Sur, 1 -IV-2014):

In the European bourgeois revolutions of 1848-1849, which displaced or brought onto the stage of history a number of oppressed nationalities, it was typical that, if the strength and voice of the Ukrainian movement increased, they immediately declared it an «invention» of some « foreign power» or the ever-present Machiavellian Bismarck, or the «German General Staff», or even the Vatican.

Ukraine was a pseudo-unredeemed land. In the bourgeois revolutionary press, the Ukrainians were labeled as an ahistorical, counter-revolutionary people "of peasants and people". It was Frederick Engels who, in 1890 (on the Russian Sozialdemokrat, in the essay on "The foreign policy of tsarism", not by chance banned by Stalin), defined the Ukrainians as a "specific nationality, different from the Russians", arousing the ire of Vera Zasulich and the father of Russian Marxism, Georgij Valentinovič Plekhanov. For Engels, the Ukrainians "had been forcibly annexed" in 1772. Russian Orthodox Marxism, on the other hand, from which Stalinist National Bolshevism developed, treated the "Ukrainian-philes" (former "Ruthenians" under the Polish nobility and under tsarism). Between 1918 and 1919, during the civil war, the mass shootings by the Red Army of entire populations were not uncommon for the sole fact that they spoke Lukrain, a language that will be considered "counter-revolutionary" during Stalinism .

Lenin's policy with respect to nationalities sought to remedy the situation somewhat. But the misunderstanding of the Ukrainian nation (or the Polish, Finnish, Latvian, Belarusian, Georgian or Armenian ones) cost the Bolshevik Party three years of bloody civil war and bloody internal division. Finally, Ukraine lost its independence in 1922, after the crackdown in Kronstadt, the Tambov riots and the capitalist state restoration with the NEP (New Economic Policy). Lenin, in vain, tried to adopt radical measures against Russian Bolshevik chauvinism within the state apparatus and within the party apparatus in its Ukrainian section (created after the October Revolution, in April 1918, composed mostly of Russians, and representing 0,2% of the Ukrainian population): the so-called «indigenization measures» (or Korenizacija). Everything came to a head with the strengthening of Stalin's rule. In the bloody purges of the Pcus of 1933, those executed were accused of being "crypto-fascists", "terrorists", "degenerate nationalists". Ukrainian was banned and Russian was established as the official language. From here, we can see how the Ukrainian question constitutes the "ethnic nerve point", yesterday of Stalinist and post-Khrushchevian state monopoly capitalism, and today of Putin's aggressive "Great Russian" nationalism.

In the current vernacular the historical-concrete dimension of the "Ukrainian question" is neglected and everything is seen under the lens of a Manichean reading of history. The results are evident. Is a democratic revolution – almost “classical” – set in motion in Kiev that overthrows an autocratic and corrupt government? Well, it is transformed into a conspiratorial farce, as was done with the Ruthenians in 1848-1849. Everything becomes an "invention", an artificial product of the USA, a "coup d'état" by the Pentagon, a "putsch" supervised by the European Union.

Of course, it is evident, indeed it is "normal", that imperialism (American or British, French or German) intervenes or tries to intervene to "orient" a popular revolt towards its interests. It is none other than that extension of power that we have already seen operating in Georgia and in Ukraine itself well before the ongoing war of aggression, and also in the Balkan nations.

But the political-cultural orientations of the Ukrainian social classes, "their" national problem, "their" organizations, "their" slogans, "their" role in the Maidan movement and the resulting party system, from the dual power in Kiev to the content of the political-national demands (the definitive separation or not from Russia, and to go towards Europe), must also be interpreted as the evident contradictions typical of all democratic revolutions, which take place, from what world is world, with the same social forms: they are, as Marcel Mauss would say, a "total social fact" and as such they must be interpreted and studied, and not only as an extension of the foreign policy of the nations that dominate the world.

Hence the role of the oligarchies and the reasons for their "insurrectionary" character in new and typical forms of the intra-oligarchic struggle. The freezing of the revolution in a mere change of leadership group and the same socio-economic history of Ukraine, inextricably linked to Russian aggression, should be nothing more than a reason for study and political intervention and not just a television show and a side game between political cusps now reduced to companies of fortune enslaved to the international powers in the field for the hegemony and for the domination of China and that part of Europe that would derive from it.

I will concentrate on the Russian front, in its aggressive manifestation, and I will try to immerse this phase of the Ukrainian national revolution in an international dimension (my poor skills do not allow me to do anything else). Because a popular uprising, with millions of people participating in it for years and demanding less poverty and corruption and more democracy, cannot be reduced to a "Nazi coup" orchestrated by and by NATO, by Joe Biden or Boris Johnson. The multi-ethnic Maidan movement (Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Tatars, Jews, inspired by the activism of an Afghan and Muslim student, Mustafa Nayyem), complex and contradictory, with 38% of participants aged between 15 and 29 years old and with broad popular support, he cannot be reduced to the fascist minority of «Pravyj Sektor».

As Varela said, it is "a caricature worthy of a bourgeois realist". Of course: the Ukrainian political reality is complicated and difficult to understand. For example: the ultra-right and the Eurosceptic right «Svoboda» in 2012 obtained 10,4% of the votes, much less than many right-wing parties in France or Italy (ideologically very similar to the US Republican Party, it was not predominant in Maidan). The Pravyj Sektor presented its candidacy for the presidency for the first time in the elections of 25 May 2014: it was a strange "Nazi coup d'état", with a party in which there was a strong Jewish presence, which applied neoliberal recipes and which called free elections without any ideological foreclosures, in which the pro-Russian Communist Party of Ukraine freely participated.

One should not be surprised, if one meditates on European history, that, with a mechanical vision of the world inspired by the Stalinist Diamat, so many socialists and communists of the period between the two world wars "justified" the attack on Poland and the occupation of western Ukraine, which was repopulated by native Russians and from where approximately one million Poles, Ukrainians and Jews were deported to Siberia and Central Asia. Nor should it be surprising that they "justified" the war against Finland in 1940, the repression of the German workers in Berlin in 1953, the invasion of Hungary in 1956, the aggression of Czechoslovakia in 1968, up to distrust of Gorbachev, while they applauded then, with a harlequin twist, the «democratic» triumph of a «liberator» Yeltsin from «communism».

WHERE IS UKRAINE GOING? THE FASCIST DRIFT IS NOT IN KIEV BUT IN MOSCOW

If there is an unimaginative "fascist" drift, this is manifesting itself not in Kiev but in the East, in Moscow. The imperial ideology of Putin and his national-Bolshevik allies, as the "spirit of the time", embraces almost all the conditions for an authentic drift towards fascist forms.

Only if this independent analytical model is adopted can and must we condemn Putin's invasion and politically hope that in Kiev and in the Maidan movement there will be no room for neo-fascists and neo-Nazis. A realist theory of international relations has nothing to do with these primitive and ideologically reactionary reductionisms. It can make its own the words of Karl Marx in the "First Manifesto" of the First International regarding the imperialist war between Bismarck's Germany and Napoleon III's France:

"The simple laws of Morals and Justice which must regulate relations between people must also impose their validity as supreme laws of behavior among nations".

A realist theory of international relations understands this ideal as a goal to be pursued strenuously and not as the only tool with which to operate in order to better pursue it. This is the moral inspiration that prompted me to write this book.

Premise of Ukraine year zero. A War Between Worlds - Book by Giulio Sapelli